The smartest way to share screenshots in Chrome

I seem to be capturing about 4,977 screenshots per day. And most of the time it’s not just for fun. Primarily, a web site or part of a process is captured to show other people, readers, or colleagues.

The process of sharing screenshots on Android is easy. In recent Android versions, when you capture a screenshot, you get editing options, and then you can send the final image wherever you want with a single tap.

But in desktop Chrome, this simple process is surprisingly complex. Of course, the Chrome browser has all sorts of systems for storing screenshots, and it also has a great own screenshot tool. But from here, you can annotate the image, save it as a step, and then share the screenshot through a messaging app or an email app through the complicated process of finding the saved file.

In my endless pursuit of productivity, I found a much more optimized option. Snippyly, a relatively new system, is the protagonist. Although the name is a little ridiculous and difficult to pronounce, it saves users time and simplifies the workflow, making it even more efficient to share screenshots. It’s also fun as a bonus.

Let’s see how it works. First, install the Sniply extension on Chrome. Now click the icon or press the Ctrl+Shift+Y shortcut to capture the web page you’re currently viewing. At the same time, Snipely’s editing tools appear in a new tab.

Here you can crop, add rectangles or arrows, and type text over the image. If you select the hide option, you can draw a rectangle to hide part of the image. You can even add long comments, which appear as exclamation points and expand like a discussion window. 

This is where the true power of Snipely is revealed, and you can create an interactive canvas and share the screenshots you want without any additional downloads or attachments. Instead of saving and re-uploading, you can simply click the large share button to choose between editable and view-only links. This option is an easy-to-view interface in collaborative applications.

Choosing the editable access option suddenly creates a real-time collaborative environment. This is because you can do additional work on the screenshot, and you can see the work done by other users in real time. In Google Docs, the team members can work together in an environment optimized for screenshots.

To put it another way, the inspiration for this tool seems to come from Google as well. The developers, two former Google product managers, said they were disappointed with Google’s internal tools that allow them to work this way after leaving the company. In fact, the two developers described Snipely as “an external public version of Google’s most used internal productivity tool.”

Since Snipelli does not require a separate subscription, it is also clear in terms of privacy protection. However, if you create an account, you can centrally store your own screenshots and reuse or manage them. Obviously, this data cannot be sold by Snipely or shared elsewhere, and captured screenshots can be deleted at any time.